Devils Mansion :

The exterior was a miniature and the exterior had to be a location we still had to find to suit the miniature.

Yamina Eddyani ( seamster and prop fabricator ) suggested this amazing old house, just at the center of Antwerp. And it fitted nicely!

The exterior was the first miniature Samuel van Broekhoven have ever built and I must say I think it looked awesome!

On this project we had split the work because we only had 1,5 month for the preproduction and had to do quite an impressive amount of work - so he was mostly responsible for the studio sets and I was more responsible for the location sets. Being both production designers on this project it was a great plan to split it this way. He was the art director and I was the set decorator.

For the Devil's Mansion I used a lot of symbolism to try and enrich the layers of the space. For example, in the Bible, they call the devil the ruler of the world - there is a scene in the script where the main characters have a whiskey at the bar in the mansion. I used world shaped bar for that scene. Or the horrible things we know of in the name of power- colonialism, Sovjet socialism, fascism, ...those elements are very present at the mansion. Samuel had this cool idea to put some apples on the table - reference to Adam and Eve and the apple given by the devil. I painted almost all of the figurines eyes red color as a tribute to my father - who once painted eyes of a few statues in my home city, Odessa also red color.

We work a lot with an amazing prop hunter and prop master/set dresser Bas Bonhof - together we found some great stuff and we set dressed the place.

For Devils dinner, I took the most disgusting things I could think of a human/demon would eat - and we bought chicken hearts, tongue, kidneys,...

My dream was to buy a brain but there was none so we went with cauliflower and I have put a black sheep skull in front of it to have this freaky bran reference. Hope you enjoy this work!